While it hasn’t been widely reported, Kingston has made the hard decision to discontinue their popular, excellently-priced SSDNow V-Series 40GB SSD line. While this drive is based off of a robust Intel design and we gave it an extremely positive review quite recently, it seems that Kingston’s choice of an OEM Intel drive is coming back to bite them hard.

TRIM support is an important aspect of any SSD working within the Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 environments. At its most basic, TRIM allows SSDs to maintain their high levels of performance for much longer and virtually eliminates the mid-life performance robbing issues non-supporting drives encounter.

Unfortunately, in order to incorporate TRIM support for this drive, Kingston needed to receive approval and programming files from Intel. From our understanding, the negotiations weren’t successful and Kingston decided to cut production of the V-Series 40GB.

Our contact at Kingston had this to say:

“We were unable to negotiate TRIM support from our vendor so we had to make the unfortunate decision to discontinue the SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drive.”

This really is the only course of action they could take since without TRIM, it would not be a viable option when compared to Intel’s own X25-V 40GB. Naturally, the X25-V supports TRIM.

This breakdown in negotiations has not led to much of a degradation of the relationship between Kingston and Intel according to our contact. Who said: “We are sad that this happened of course but we have a terrific relationship with them on many levels — from marketing to engineering — and that remains strong and unchanged”

Other than discontinuing the 40GB model, Kingston is also introducing a new 30GB SSDNow V-Series which is not based on an Intel drive and will support TRIM in all its glory.

A Work Around?

There are still plenty of SSDNow 40GB drives available at retailers since this discontinuation of the line does not affect products which have already made it into the retail channels. In addition, there are plenty of people who have these drives and want TRIM support.

Instead of being totally out of luck, a forum member on Overclock.net seems to have found a solution which allows TRIM to work on Kingston’s budget drives. Other members claim that the solution works but as with all unofficial work-arounds, be aware that if you use it, you do so at your own risk. You can read more about it HERE.

Another option to consider if you don’t want to mess with a firmware that could void your warranty is what’s being called a Tony-TRIM